Most of the time, when people criticize the Bush administration for its go-it-alone attitude toward the rest of the world, it has to do with things like treaties (Kyoto, the International Criminal Court) or Iraq (remember the "coalition of the willing"?) or relations with Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the like. For public consumption, the administration has argued that other countries should not be permitted to constrain U.S. action.
Now it turns out that the neocons' rigid commitment to unilateralism has kept us from collecting $814 million in aid other countries offered us in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Of course, the administration's first line of defense in response to this is to claim incompetence:
In one exchange, State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and were destroyed. "Tell them we blew it," one disgusted official wrote. But she hedged: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."
But as I've noted before, the incompetence defense is phony. The things this administration has done so badly--waging war in Iraq, veterans' health care, the sacking of U.S. Attorneys, the response to Katrina, etc.--have been done badly not because incompetent people are executing sound policies. They have been done badly because the policies themselves are unsound.
This argument can be hard to see when the subject is the outsourcing of veterans' health care, for example, but it's crystal-clear when the administration's flips off other countries' offers of post-Katrina help. This administration would rather let the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast suffer than admit that we live in an interdependent world.
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